14
Meanwhile, Dash was making swift progress in finding his way to the Foghorns’ place. He had run out of Mrs Fudge’s garden and around to the front of the house and was already down Liquorice Drive.
‘I shall follow Tallulah’s and Smug’s scents and track down their house,’ he said to himself. ‘It shouldn’t be too hard. That pug reeks of self-importance and Tallulah has a particularly pungent waft of Miss Clever-Two-Shoes about her.’
He put his long pointy nose to the ground and followed the niffs out to the main road that led into Crumbly-under-Edge. He had soon left the shops and the park behind him. Dogs he knew barked out greetings and asked him where he was going, but he did not hear them, he was concentrating so hard. He passed the neat rows of houses with their white picket fences in the newer part of town, and still the scents led him on.
Suddenly the Smuggy-puggy scent of pleased-with-himself-smugness and Tallulah’s cleverness became overwhelming.
‘If I didn’t know for certain that they were still with Pippa, I would say they were both right here,’ he said aloud.
He chased his tail round and round as he sniffed and sniffed at the powerful odours. Then at last he looked up ahead and realized that in his race to follow the scent he had taken himself all the way to the other side of the town. It was an area he was unfamiliar with. He certainly did not recognize the gate he had stopped at: it was rusty and hanging off its hinges at an odd angle, and it creaked noisily as it swung in the chilly April breeze.
‘This place looks as though it has been empty for years,’ Dash mused as he looked down the path, which was overgrown with weeds. The front door had been painted white once upon a time, but now the paint was peeling off it and the brass knocker and the letter box were dull and dirty with age. (None of this had made the slightest impression on Pippa when she had visited. She had been far too excited about the scooter-mobile and about visiting her new friends’ home.)
The door was open a tiny crack, Dash noted with puzzlement.
He tiptoed around the side of the house to investigate at the back. ‘It is odd that I cannot seem to pick up any other scents,’ he said to himself. ‘Surely I should be able to sniff out Tallulah’s grandfather as well . . . unless . . . unless he doesn’t exist!’
Dash sat back on his haunches and pondered. ‘What wouldn’t I give for a couple of nice crunchy bones to help me think through this conundrum,’ he said. ‘This is another one of those two-bone problems. But there’s no way of getting a nice crunchy bone around here, so I shall just have to rely on good old common sense.’ He closed his eyes, all the better to concentrate. ‘Let me think . . . No one, not even Raphael, has seen hide nor hair of this grandfather person. And yet Tallulah must have someone to look after her. Even I know that Smug, however marvellous he is, is a dog, and therefore cannot look after a human child. Unless – oh no!’ Dash shivered. ‘What if Smug is her grandfather? What if he is a spy of some kind and has invented a way of turning himself into a dog so that he can go undercover?’ Dash felt a ripple of panic run through him. ‘I have to get back to the salon and warn Pippa,’ he told himself. ‘But she’ll want proof. If I don’t bring proof, she will just tell me off again for making everything up and being jealous.’
He was really feeling very nervous now about what he might find, but he knew he had to be brave. ‘I am doing this for Pippa and for Mrs Fudge,’ he told himself as he crept along to the back door.
As luck would have it, there was an old cat flap installed there, which was just the right size for a miniature dachshund to crawl through. He poked his nose through first and had a good sniff around.
‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘Still not much in the way of new aromas – nothing to suggest a grandfatherly presence.’
(If you want to know what a grandfather smells like, you will have to ask Dash, as I have no idea.) Next Dash summoned up his courage and leaped daintily through the cat flap.
He was as shocked as Pippa had been by the state of the place. ‘It’s a good job I have such an amazing sense of smell!’ the little dog exclaimed. ‘My eyes are not much good to me here.’ Being the short pooch he was, he could not see beyond the furniture and the stacks of books and papers. He scuttled along to the Inventionary, where another machine seemed to be in the early stages of development. There was less clutter on the floor in this room, so Dash was able to take in the complicated contraption with its ropes and levers and coils and springs and bells and whistles.
‘What on earth is this going to be for?’ Dash wondered aloud.
He decided to jump on to a low chair and from there to a table so that he could get a closer look at the invention.
Not that this gave him any clearer an idea. He did, however, find a piece of paper on which was scrawled the most perplexing arrangement of letters:
‘He must be a spy!’ Dash said. ‘Only spies use codes. And this looks exactly like code to me’ (which just goes to show exactly how clever he was).
Why, thank you!
You’re welcome.
But sadly he was not quite clever enough to work out how to break the code.
Hey!
Well, you weren’t, were you?
*blushes* NO . . .
And so he was left none the wiser. However, he did think it might be a clue.
‘If this doesn’t prove the grandfather is a tricky piece of work, I don’t know what does,’ he said. Then he picked up the piece of paper and held it gently in his mouth. ‘I will take it back to Chop ’n’ Chat as evidence.’
He then eyed the apparatus in front of him and thought about touching it to see what would happen. He stared up at the huge muddle of levers and ropes and wheels and attachments which surrounded a very ordinary-looking chair.
The contraption was monstrous! If you had peeked through the window, you would have seen how small and vulnerable the little pooch was next to the device towering over him. But Dash was a brave dog. He carefully dropped the piece of paper he had been holding and went up to the machine. It smelt of oil and metal and not much else. He stepped back and noticed there was a very small lever just within reach of his nose. His curiosity overcame his nerves and he gently nudged the lever. Then, oh dear . . .
ZOOM! CLICK! WHIRR!
Two hands appeared from nowhere and held him in a vice-like grip. They lifted him from the ground and plonked him on to the chair.
‘Ouch!’ shouted Dash.
Whirr, click, SQUELCH!
A huge object that looked like a sink plunger was lowered over Dash’s head and fastened itself to his scalp with a nasty sucking noise.
‘Argh!’ yelled Dash. He wriggled in vain to free himself.
Then the whirring and the clicking increased in volume and a ticking noise started up somewhere behind him. If Dash had known anything about computers, he might have said that it sounded like paper coming out of a printer. But he was a dog and knew nothing of such things. In any case, he was far too upset by now to be thinking much beyond, ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE!’
Then something very odd happened. The noises all stopped at once. The sink-plunger-sucker thing removed itself from Dash’s head (unfortunately taking rather a lot of his lovely red fur with it) and the hands let go of him. He was about to leap for safety when he heard another ticking, clicking noise – and then he froze.
A long streamer of paper, like loo roll, had come flying through the air. As it dropped in front of Dash, he caught sight of the words, ‘Ouch!’ and ‘Argh!’ and ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE!’
That’s funny, he thought. That’s exactly what I was thinking when I was trapped in that thing. I really should investigate further—
But the very second that he thought this, something came out of the seat behind him, gave him an almighty push and propelled him out of the Inventionary and into the hall. The front door blew open ahead of him, and he was pushed out on to the drive, where he landed in a crumpled heap.
‘That does it!’ he whimpered, puffing and panting as he picked himself up. ‘I am going back to tell Pippa right now what sort of dangerous nonsense her new friends are up to. We cannot possibly let them loose on the poochy population of Crumbly-under-Edge!’